Fabulous furry pterosaur unearthed in China

Children's dinosaur books will have to be rewritten – or at least redrawn – yet again. It turns out that the flying reptiles that dominated the skies during the age of the dinosaurs were fuzzballs.

A few years ago Chinese palaeontologists rewrote prehistory when they discovered that many dinosaurs were feathered. Now a pterosaur from the Inner Mongolia region of China has been found to be covered in hair-like fibres.

The hairy pterosaur was discovered in the Daohugou deposits, which are renowned for exquisitely preserved fossil animals, often with skin and other soft tissue intact. This allowed Kellner and his colleagues at the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, China, to take the most detailed ever look at the soft tissue of a pterosaur's wing.

The team doesn't yet know whether the fibres were more like mammalian hair or the "protofeathers" seen on some dinosaurs, nor what they were made of, but Kellner describes them as "thick and bushy". The fibres appear to be thicker and bushier closer to the body of the pterosaur, dubbed Jeholopterus ningchengensis, and less so on the wing extremities.

Similar fibres have been seen on an as-yet unnamed species of pterosaur from Brazil, Kellner says. And in 1971, a Soviet palaeontologist, Aleksandr Sharov, said he had seen hairs on a specimen on the pterosaur Psordes pilosus, but this was widely dismissed. Kellner told New Scientist that he thinks that most flying reptiles were probably fuzzy.

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